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All-Catholic VP debate livestream / viewing party / open thread.

You can watch a livestream of the debate below. If you want to follow along with the comment thread, I suggest opening this page in another tab, and reloading it regularly to keep up with the conversation.

Grant GallichoRe: "Biden is killing it right now. Ryan looks dramatically overmatched." During the Obama debate you wrote that Obama was doing allright. Now you must be wearing a blindfold and earmuffs. Except for one well delivered, impassioned statement Biden is blustering and by interrupting hie is making a fool of himself. Biden is overmatched, period.

When Ryan said, "Assad has killed tens of thousands of his own people!" I had a flashback to the run-up to the Iraq war, when we kept hearing that Saddam Hussein was evil because he had killed his own people. Of course he was evil, but he was a Sunni Arab, and other Sunni Arabs were his own people. Most of the Iraqis he killed were Kurds and Shiites. I strongly suspect that Assad is going out of his way to AVOID killing his own people. What Americans, especially the neocons, never have understood is that in that part of the world, tribal loyalties outweigh national boundaries. You can't create an artificial country, as the European and American colonial powers did for centuries, and expect that everyone within those borders will start getting along even if their tribes have been warring with each other for centuries.